2018 Toyota Camry long-term review — Rise of the robots

2018 Toyota Camry long-term review — Rise of the robots

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Week 3: The kays keep on piling, but this week it is a battle against the annoying lady robot in our 2018 Toyota Camry long-term car

This week the insanity continues. Every morning while driving to Abu Dhabi from Dubai and back, the sheer amount of dangerous driving and stupidity you witness on the roads is baffling. However, there is an upside to this madness-riddled schlep every day. A small one, but an upside nonetheless: the fuel economy of our Toyota Camry V6 is shaping up to be rather good. Having left it in cruise control most of the way I am registering a fuel consumption of just 7.8 litres per 100km. Whichever way you cut it that’s pretty good for a 3.5-litre V6, especially if you’re driving in excess of 300km per day.

In the not so good news, the sat-nav is complicated to operate. I accidentally input a destination while on the move, and the lady robot started instructing me to turn around and head back to Dubai. Given the standard of driving on the Dubai-Abu Dhabi highway I thought it best to not try and go through menu after menu while on the move. I muted the said lady robot.

On the way back, she came alive. Again, annoyingly while I was on the highway. I couldn’t cancel the navigation for obvious reasons. Mute.

For some reason, the lady robot insists on guiding you even when you’ve killed her with the engine-stop button – she annoyingly keeps coming back to life every time you restart the car. The machines are rising and they have an extremely irritating voice.

This carried on for nearly three days, before I finally decided to try to find the heart of the lady robot – buried somewhere deep within the various menus, no doubt – and strike there to shut her up once and for all. I failed. I gave up and resigned to my fate.

For the next four days, my start-up ritual was thus: get in, fasten seat-belt, start engine, mute sat-nav. Imagine, I had to do all of this while contending with the kamikaze drivers on the highway, especially if I had to stop off at a petrol station and restarted the car. Not a pleasant week. Apart from the fuel economy – that was good.